Battle Royal

by Hugh Bicheno

  Two things spoiled the party for them. First, Edward was no Warwick. Knowing the enemy would expect him to pause to lick his wounds, he ordered an immediate general advance. He sent Warwick’s shaken battle to Castleford, to advance along the Roman Ridge Road screened by Fauconberg’s Van, while he led his battle from Pontefract across the bridge and north along the Great North Road, leaving Norfolk to follow with the wagons.

  Secondly, Lady Luck did not smile on the Lancastrians. It seems Clifford had not sent scouts to check the crossing at Castleford, perhaps assuming it was not viable because the river was in spate. Therefore, unaware that Fauconberg had sent squadrons of fore-riders across the Aire the day before, he conducted a leisurely retreat along the Great North Road, dropping off pairs of riders to watch for pursuit.

  As the miles passed without any of them riding back to him, the pace would have dropped to a comfortable walk, and his tired men would have relaxed in their saddles. It is probable Clifford had received confirmation that the main Lancastrian army was on its way and would rendezvous with him at the hill overlooking the village of Saxton. Turning west at the crossroads of the Great North Road and the lane leading to Saxton, he led his command into an ambush in the little valley called Dinting Dale.

  Leadman, the best of the Victorian historians of the battle, says ‘they met with some that they had not looked for, and were attrapped’, in a context which suggests the trap was set by men sent racing up the Roman Ridge Road by Fauconberg after the battle at Ferrybridge. Alternatively they may have been fore-riders who had narrowly missed encountering Clifford’s men on their way south, and had plenty of time to prepare an annihilating ambush for them when they returned. Clifford, Neville and most of their men were killed.

  Not only was this a severe loss of inspiring leaders and elite troops, it also caused Somerset and Northumberland to slow their advance after the survivors reached them. As a result, Fauconberg’s Van was the first substantial body of troops to arrive at Saxton. His scouts would have fanned out towards Tadcaster and kept him informed about the progress of the Lancastrian army, while preventing theirs from providing the same service.

  The most recent research argues persuasively that Ferrybridge, Dintingdale and Towton all took place on the same day, it being understood that a medieval ‘day’ was calculated very differently from the way it is today.*1 The proper anniversary of the battle is 6 April, which was 29 March in the Julian calendar then in use, and the day when the moveable feast of Palm Sunday was celebrated.

  As to timings, the medieval day began 6 a.m. with the liturgical Prime (first hour), a fixed time of prayer of the traditional Divine Office. Lauds marked actual daybreak, and so varied in time from place to place and season to season. Prime was timekeeping, as were the daytime offices of Terce, Sext, None and Vespers at three-hourly intervals, and Matins punctuated the night hours. Variable Compline marked actual nightfall.

  The chart shows the timings of dawn and nightfall in Yorkshire on 6 April 2014. I have no idea what, if any, variation there may have been in the rotational axis of the Earth in the intervening 553 years, but it will not have made more than a few minutes of difference. The point is there would have been nearly fourteen hours of sufficient light for fighting, and that the medieval Palm Sunday ran on to what we would consider 0600 the following Monday.

  In a letter to Papal Legate Coppini, his physician wrote: ‘the battle was begun on Palm Sunday, at the hour of prime, at Pontefract’. The Lord Chancellor, Bishop George Neville, wrote the earliest account, also to Coppini, in which he stated: ‘on Palm Sunday, near a town called Feurbirga… there was a great conflict, which began with the rising of the sun, and lasted until the tenth hour of the night’. ‘The Rose of Rouen’ also contains a highly significant timing. The stanza goes as follows (my italics):

  The northern party made them strong with spear and shield,

  On Palm Sunday, after the none, they met us in the field

  Within an hour they were right fayne to flee, and eke to yield.

  The highlighted phrase has generally been misunderstood as ‘afternoon’, whereas it means very specifically ‘after 3 p.m.’ If the battle that took place between Saxton and Towton began between 3 and 4 p.m., then 9−10 hours had already elapsed since the battle of Palm Sunday began. That was more than double the time the two armies required to march to the battlefield from, respectively, York and Pontefract, without guns or wagons to slow them down. It is not only entirely possible but highly likely that fighting began at Ferrybridge at 0600−0630, and continued until 0600 the next day by modern reckoning.*2

  Coppini had fled to Flanders after Wakefield, but those who wrote to him knew he would share the information they sent with the pope and the Duke of Burgundy. Accordingly Bishop Neville’s letter was what we now call ‘informal communication’, which also explains why he ridiculously alleged that 28,000 had died in the battle. He wanted to reassure Pius II and Duke Philippe that they had backed the right horse, and sought to evoke Pharsalus, Julius Caesar’s crushing victory over Pompey in 48 BC, which brought their civil war to an end.

  A death toll 28,000 would have been not only vastly more than for any other battle of the Wars of the Roses, but also 40 per cent more than the British Army suffered on the first day on the Somme, 455 years later. Furthermore, if 28,000 were killed, at least as many suffered survivable wounds, for a minimum total of 56,000 combat casualties. Just to account for these, each side would have had to field an army more than twice as large as any other in the Wars of the Roses.

  A combined total of 56,000 men would also have been nearly twice as many as Charles VII of France assembled for the reconquest of Normandy, after years of preparation, drawing on a larger population, possessed of superior organization and enjoying greater resources. Since a minimum casualty rate of 100 per cent is an evident absurdity, the actual number of combatants would have had to be greater even than the hallucinatory 100,000 claimed in Edward Hall’s Chronicle, allegedly based on the original muster rolls.

  The largest army assembled during the Wars of the Roses was probably Henry’s during the Ludford Bridge campaign, in which he was supported by three dukes, six earls, a viscount and at least eleven barons, all of whom had been issued commissions of array. Even though there appears to have been a bigger turn-out of the gentry for the Towton campaign, there is no way they could have compensated for the notably lower number of peers. The city of Coventry only sent forty men initially and sixty more later, and the average knight or squire would have brought far fewer.

  If each army at Towton, including non-combatant personnel, numbered between fifteen and twenty thousand, it would have been pushing the upper limit of what the country could provide and sustain. As to the number killed, the estimate of 9,000 in William Worcester’s ‘Annales Rerum Anglicarum’ is at least possible – if it includes all those killed in the three separate battles that day.

  With regard to the battle itself, everything written about it before 2000 (and some since) must be revised in the light of the findings of the Towton Battlefield Archaeological Survey (TBAS). For the purposes of establishing how the battle was fought, the principal value of the TBAS has been the belated recognition it brought to the outstanding private enterprise of Simon Richardson, who since 1985 has scrupulously plotted many hundreds of metal detector hits over the entire area where fighting may have taken place.

  In the following chapter I propose a battle development to match the areas where Richardson found dense concentrations of hits. Some will be metallic debris from later dates, but not many: there were no hits at all in areas where we know no fighting took place. That he found so few near the Cock Beck in Towton Dale and Bloody Meadow is probably attributable to the unsystematic work of metal detector hobbyists, who will have concentrated their efforts in these areas on the basis of the canonical account of the battle. Other artefacts in this area will have washed into the Cock Beck, which I have shown in Map 27 (next chapter) swollen by spring run-off, with
pools in the two places where modern contours suggest it could have been backed up on Palm Sunday 1461.

  Richardson also found no hits in the area where the lane now called the Old London Road once crossed the Cock Beck, supposedly the site of the ‘bridge of bodies’ massacre. This is another legacy of Victorian historiography, which had the Great North Road doglegging at Towton to cross the stream west of the town, before turning sharp right to Tadcaster and York. The lane does not appear in the earliest road maps, which all show the Great North Road following the line of the modern A162, bridging the Cock Beck not far from where it runs into the River Wharfe, close to Tadcaster.*3

  For several reasons we can dismiss the tale told in Hall’s Chronicle, in which Fauconberg provoked the Lancastrians out of their defensive posture by sending his archers forward, with the wind and snow at their backs, to fire a long-range volley:

  The northern men feeling the shoot, but by reason of the snow not knowing the distance between them and their enemy, like hardy men shot their sheaves of arrows as fast as they might, but all their shot was lost and their labour was in vain. When their shot was almost spent, the Lord Fauconberg marched forward with his archers, which not only shot their own full sheaves, but also gathered the arrows of their enemies and let a great part of them fly against their own masters.

  Archers would not have wasted their arrows in blind, parabolic flight: they would have saved them for use in the accurate killing range of 50 yards or less, and few arrows driven deep into the ground would have been immediately reusable. As to the snow, spring was well under way, hence the streams and rivers in spate. Temperatures were declining from the Medieval Warm Period, but the Little Ice Age, from which we are still emerging, only really got going in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If any snow did fall, it was a light, unseasonal flurry. Since Hall’s account depends on the Lancastrian archers being blinded by the snow, he may have invented it as the necessary deus ex machina.

  Furthermore, if the Lancastrians had arrived first with the intention of taking up a strong defensive position, they would have formed up on the hill overlooking the village of Saxton. The position is so strong, facing south, that two late Victorian historians argued it must have been held by the Lancastrians. Archaeology, however, has confirmed the Lancastrian start line was indeed on the next hill to the north, on the other side of Towton Dale, between the two roads that converge on the village of Towton.

  Indisputable truth is not something to look for in any military-historical reconstruction. What follows is a hypothesis that accepts some of the more general parts of contemporary reports, but which is shaped above all by the testimony of the only reliable witnesses: geography, topography and archaeology.

  *1 See Tim Sutherland’s brilliant online article ‘Killing time: challenging the common perceptions of three medieval conflicts – Ferrybridge, Dintingdale and Towton’, Journal of Conflict Archaeology.

  *2 John Benet’s Chronicle does state that it was a battle in three phases, all on Palm Sunday, but his account contains too many serious errors about the numbers and commanders involved to be accepted as corroboration.

  *3 See John Davey’s online article ‘The Battle of Towton 1461 – A Re-Assessment’.

  XXVIII

  * * *

  Endgame

  Fauconberg would have quickly appreciated that the Great North Road and the offshoot of the Roman Ridge Road along which he had advanced were both dominated by the hill north of Saxton. He would have occupied its eastern end, with Warwick’s battle pounding up the road behind him to form up on his left. Believing the Lancastrians intended to make a stand at the Wharfe, Edward would have had no reason to hurry his advance along the Great North Road until he was made aware of the developing situation, and so his battle arrived last.

  Long before then, messengers would have galloped frantically back down the Great North Road to tell Norfolk at Brotherton to abandon the wagons and close up as fast as his East Anglians could foot it. If not previously, Norfolk’s battle now came under the operational command of John Howard, the duke’s cousin. Without the hand-over of command to the more vigorous Howard, the East Anglians would not have arrived in time.

  The view across Towton Dale was alarming. As Northumberland’s men peeled off to form opposite Warwick, followed by the southerners under Somerset and Trollope, with Rivers coming up with the reserve, the Yorkist commanders would have seen that they were badly outnumbered. As more and more Lancastrians poured down the Great North Road, they extended their left wing well beyond Fauconberg’s battle.

  This was the moment when Fauconberg would have sent his archers forward to disrupt the orderly deployment of the Lancastrian left. Fortuitously, Warwick’s battle, the least steady of the Yorkist formations, was separated from Northumberland’s men by the deepest section of Towton Dale. The hill also fell off quite steeply to the right of Fauconberg’s position, but the ground between the centres of the two armies was almost flat. Edward would have positioned his reserve there, behind Warwick’s right flank and Fauconberg’s left. According to Wavrin:

  [Edward] jumped from his horse and told them, sword in hand, that on this day he would live or die with them in order to give them courage. Then he came in front of his banners [that is, in full view of the whole army] and waited for the enemy which was marching forward with great noise.

  Somerset attacked as soon as his army had formed for battle, the outflanked and outnumbered Yorkist right wing falling back before him. Richardson’s metal detecting hits indicate that the fighting on the eastern end and the centre of the hill was ferocious, much less so on the Yorkist left. This may help to extract some value from what is otherwise one of Wavrin’s wilder embellishments:

  When Lord Rivers, his son and six or seven thousand Welshmen [?] led by Andrew Trollope, following the Duke of Somerset himself with seven thousand men, charged [Edward’s] cavalry who fled and were chased for about eleven miles. It seemed that Lord Rivers’ troops had won a great battle, because they thought that the Earl of Northumberland had charged on the other side, unfortunately he had not done so and this became his tragic day for he died that day. During this debacle many of [Edward’s] soldiers died and when he learned the truth of what had happened to his cavalry he was very sad as well as very annoyed.

  Indeed he would have been, if his cavalry had ended up back at Pontefract! Let us assume Wavrin collected threads of the truth, but without a map to hand failed to understand them and so was unable to weave them into a coherent narrative. If for ‘Welshmen’ we read ‘West Countrymen’ and if for ‘Edward’s cavalry’ we understand Fauconberg’s battle, which had most of the Yorkist light horse, the opening sentence makes sense. Roughly three-fifths of the Lancastrian army under Somerset and Rivers crunched into Fauconberg’s men, who were driven back hundreds of yards to the line of the modern B1217.

  On the other flank, the northerners made less progress against Warwick’s men, in part because of Towton Dale but also because of the early loss of Northumberland, who was mortally wounded, and Dacre, who was killed by a crossbow bolt in the throat when he lifted his bevor to take a drink. The earlier loss of Clifford was now felt strongly, as the senior remaining northern peer was the semi-Trojan Horse FitzHugh, who could not compensate for the disheartening loss of Percy and Dacre, even if he tried. FitzHugh quite possibly did not – he would have had no stomach for a fight with Warwick, his brother-in-law.

  In this scenario, the Yorkist army was kept from defeat by Edward’s battle, which held the centre and drew the greater Lancastrian effort, permitting the other two battles to fall back in an orderly manner. There is not much doubt that Edward himself, towering over his men and dealing out death under his family’s ancestral banners, was the glue that kept his army together. This all happened very quickly. Not many Yorkists of note fell, however, which must mean their billmen held together, leaving few of the men-at-arms exposed.

  Men with nowhere to run will fight to the bitter end, whereas t
hose who see open country behind them are more tempted to flee. The rapid retreat of Fauconberg’s battle meant that the Yorkist army soon found itself backed up into a large bend in the Cock Beck and fighting for their lives. It was at this moment that Lady Luck dealt them the ace of trumps with the belated arrival of Norfolk’s battle along the Great North Road, behind the Lancastrian left.

  There is no possibility this was planned. Edward did not expect to fight another battle this day, otherwise he would not have divided his army in the advance from the Aire. It was a battle in which expectations were dislocated three times. Edward’s rapid advance dislocated the Lancastrians’ assumption that the battle at Ferrybridge would delay him, and permitted the Yorkists to occupy the hill where the Lancastrians had intended to form up. Edward’s assumption the Lancastrians would wait for him behind the Wharfe put him at a grave disadvantage when they advanced to meet him instead. The final, devastating dislocation was Norfolk’s arrival behind the Lancastrians when they thought victory was in their grasp.

  One minute the exultant Lancastrians were pressing forward to deliver the coup de grâce, and the next they had to extricate themselves from a trap. Some would have panicked, but others closed up on their banners and made a fighting retreat across the fields where so many of their comrades already lay dead and wounded. These twice fought-over areas are where Richardson found the densest concentration of hits. The formed units making their way to the Great North Road would have been left alone by the now feral Yorkist foot soldiers, who would have pursued disorganized prey fleeing from the battlefield.